1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to local information retrieval and, more particularly, to the identification of business information associated with an address.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search systems attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search systems base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search system is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search system accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user as links.
Local search systems attempt to return relevant web pages and/or business listings within a specific geographic area. When a business is mentioned on a web page, existing local search systems may match the business with yellow pages data to identify the corresponding business listing. This technique is not practicable, however, when no yellow pages data exists or the yellow pages data is incorrect for a business.